One Fifth Avenue - Candace Bushnell [97]
That was three weeks ago, and now it was nearly Christmas, and Philip had finally come up with a day for the set visit. Lola spent two days getting ready. She’d had a massage and a spray tan, her dark hair was highlighted with strands of gold, and she’d bought a dress at Marc Jacobs. After the purchase, her mother called, wondering if she had indeed just spent twenty-three hundred dollars. Lola accused her mother of using her credit card to spy on her. They had had a rare fight, and Lola hung up, felt terrible, then called her mother back. Beetelle was nearly in tears. “Mommy, what’s wrong?” Lola demanded. When her mother didn’t respond, Lola asked in a panic, “Are you and Daddy getting a divorce?” “Your father and I are fine.” “So what’s the problem?” “Oh, Lola,” her mother said, sighing. “We’ll talk about it when you come home for Christmas. In the meantime, try to be careful with money.”
This was very strange, and Lola hung up, perplexed. But then she decided it wasn’t important. Her mother got upset about money every now and again, but she always got over it and, feeling guilty, usually bought Lola a trinket like Chanel sunglasses.
Philip, meanwhile, was around the corner, getting his hair cut. He’d frequented this particular salon, located on Ninth Street off Fifth, for thirty years. His mother started coming to the salon in the seventies, when the clients and stylists would play music on a boom box and snort cocaine. Naturally, the proprietor was a dear friend of his mother’s. Everyone was a dear friend of his mother’s. She’d had that charming neediness that made people want to take care of her. She’d been a trust fund girl and considered a great beauty, but there was an air of tragedy about her that only increased her fascination. No one was surprised when she killed herself in 1983.
The proprietor, Peter, had been giving Philip the same haircut for years and was nearly finished, but Philip was trying to kill time. Peter had recently recovered from cancer and had begun to work out at a gym every day, so they talked about his routine. Then they talked about Peter’s house upstate in the Catskills. Then they talked about how the neighborhood was changing. Philip was dreading the set visit and the impending meeting of his former love and his current lover. There was a bald difference between “love” and “lover,” the first being legitimate and honorable, the second being temporary and even, he thought, when it came to Lola, slightly embarrassing.
This unpleasant reality had come to light during the dinner with the Yugoslavian director. The director, who happened to have won two Academy Awards, was an elderly man who drooled, and whose Russian wife, dressed in gold Dolce & Gabbana (and twenty years younger, about the same difference in age, Philip guessed, as he and Lola), had had to feed him his soup. The director was a curmudgeon, and his wife was ridiculous, but still, the man was a legend, and despite his age (which couldn’t be helped) and his silly wife, Philip had the utmost respect for him and had been looking forward to the dinner for months.
Lola, intentionally or not, was on her worst behavior. During a long discourse during which the director explained his next project (a movie about an obscure civil war in Yugoslavia in the thirties), Lola had attended to her iPhone, sending texts and even taking a call from one of her girlfriends in Atlanta. “Put it away,” Philip had hissed at her. She gave him a hurt look, signaled to the waiter, and asked for a Jell-O shot, explaining to the table that she didn’t drink wine, as it was for old people. “Stop it, Lola,” he said. “You do drink wine. You’ll have what everyone else is having.” “I don’t drink red wine,” she pointed out. “Besides, I need something strong to get through this dinner.” She’d asked the director if